Tonight, come to one of Baltimore’s best music venues for one heck of a lineup. Opening up for the night is Baltimore’s indie rock group Slow Lights, with a sweetly soulful, melodic vibe to share. Following is another Baltimore band, the funky space rock quartet Greasy Hands. Their sound is fun and enthralling, blending guitar riffs and keys to make you move. Up next, Philly’s own progressive alt rock trio, The Humble. Working the pedals and belting out some guttural, yet hearty vocals, these guys are guaranteed to surprise. Closing out the night, headliners The Milestones hail from Baltimore and have mastered their unique blend of alt and dance rock. Make your Saturday night awesome and check out these great bands at Ottobar, doors at 9pm, just $10. -Jonathan Goodwin

Out of the musical maze that is Brooklyn’s synthpop scene rises Matt Koenig’s solo project Undercover Dream Lovers. The project’s intriguingly weird tracks have a knack for throwing together elements that would otherwise clash. With colorful bursts of synths and electronic textures, Undercover Dream Lover’s songs are equally fitting in an 80’s movie montage as in a futuristic space travel scene. “The Master” (streaming below) features undulating synths with distorted vocals that alternate between sounding close and distant, creating an interesting effect of fluctuating intersecting sonic waves. “When You Know It’s Alright” has piercing synths and spacey electronic bouts that burst in interspersed sections throughout the song, a track we could easily play over and over again as we drive down at night into whatever the future holds. Catch Undercover Dream Lover at Baby’s All Right for their EP release show on April 8.

Just a week after releasing its sophomore EP ‘Jackson’s Big Sky,’ steadily rising Brooklyn rock sextet Great Caesar now shares the achingly sublime music video (streaming below) for the track “Hey Mama." Showing the bandmembers singing the pining lyrics to the horn-blasted song in an abandoned warehouse that oozes an odd liquid, the crisp black-and-white clip conjures a creepy, almost Lynchian aura. Talking to Earmilk, Great Caesar frontman John-Michael Parker explains that the song does, in fact, tackle “disappointment and unfulfilled expectations, and the creeping anxiety of knowing you’ve done wrong by someone you love.” With his impassioned vocals and his bandmates’ wondrous playing, though, an undeniable warmth and hope for interpersonal reconciliation ultimately comes through. While Great Caesar doesn’t seem to have upcoming shows currently listed, keep posted on its Facebook page for future announcements. – Zach Weg 

Back in February Boston’s psych band Magic Shoppe released their second E.P. Interstellar Car Crash and it’s a trippy sonic masterpiece. The tracks are guitar centric pieces with distorted vocals floating in the background and cavernous reverb unabashedly pounding in your head. With beautifully languid melodies pulsing rhythmically throughout the E.P., Magic Shoppe succeeds at creating dynamic tunes that manage to maintain a sense of calm despite all that’s happening around them. The last track, “Interstella Car Crash” (streaming below), is the perfect example of that. Starting off with with an uniform tempo, vocals echoing in the distance the guitars sputter evenly before exploding into a spirited riff in the final minute. It’s like watching a star collapse into itself in slow motion and then witnessing it burst into a supernova of brilliant colors and sounds– a wondrous natural phenomena of galactic proportions that leaves us with our mouths agape, staring at the sky in awe.

How does quiet and cool come off as impassioned? One might ask lo-fi duo Old Fashioned Bleeding Hearts (a band we stumbled upon at Baby’s All Right in February), who offer up a cool blend of subdued, almost shy instrumentals, with hushed, yet incredibly heartfelt vocal harmonies, injected with very unabashed emotionality. Colton Tracy’s delicate guitar is almost completely self-aware, melding into Trevor Tattan’s drums patterns; the one being struck in the exact same timbre as the other. Delicate picking and calm strumming lovingly coats and caresses the light hits of snare drum, or the pitter of hi-hat, all creating a foundation on which the two vocalists can find footing, and soothe one another, and consequently, the audience. The instruments play as though they’re peeking out from behind a curtain, until they flourish into lushly strummed chords, and the stage is set for the main attraction of vocal tranquility. – JP Basileo

Even though The Teen Age‘s recently released EP ‘Bad Seed’ was written as an “ode to growing older,” single “Backwards” feels emotionally rooted in the now. Under the production eye of Jason Finkel at Converse Rubber Tracks studios, the band makes the most out of immediately catchy guitar riffs and a joyously propulsive rhythm. While the verses may bring to mind early days of The Strokes, the chorus serves to elevate the track into an instant classic.  With its pairing of a guitar line melody with the vocal hook “I don’t want to live without you – I just keep on falling backwards,” the song is bound to woo fans of the heart-tugging surf-pop of Beach Fossils. This week the garagey quartet is playing two consecutive nights at Rough Trade: the first show is tonight (03.31) with Slaves,  the second one tomorrow (4/1) with two other Deli NYC favorites Celestial Shore and Monogold. – Dave Cromwell

Vundabar serves as a breath of fresh air out of the tidal waves of folk and hardcore rock that swamp Boston’s music scene. With indie rock at the core of its DNA, Vundabar infuses pop melodies and jangly guitar riffs to create their infectiously energetic sound. Often times switching up the tempo and rhythm mid-way through a song, these sudden changes of direction give their songs a welcomed air of unpredictability and a sharp edge to dance along on. What Vundabar manages to do wonderfully is probably how they take quiet moments in their songs and blow it up with bursts of jagged electric guitars and ragged vocals seamlessly, shocking you with currents of effervescence. The only thing that rivals their sound is their live performances, so catch them at Great Scott on April 30 and take listen below. – Adriana S Ballester

Almost effortlessly, ‘How Strange It Is To See’ by Brooklyn folk act Adeline Hotel (aka singer/songwriter Daniel Knishkowy) compels the listener with its quiet power. Bookended by the drum-clasped “Everything Is Going To Be Fine” (streaming below) and the ambling, Wilco-recalling title track, the brisk EP tackles such eternal themes as the passage of time with both gentility and passion, refinement and wildness and, consequently, makes for an instantly memorable listen. Ahead of the release of Adeline Hotel’s forthcoming effort, ‘It’s Alright, Just The same’ on May 13th, Knishokwy will play several upcoming shows including Union Pool on 4/2 and Baby’s All Right on 4/24. – Zach Weg

Portland’s Jackson Boone is the latest in a long line of Syd Barrett acolytes going back to David Bowie and Marc Bolan. Boone, in fact, works past much of Barrett’s tension en route to spaced-out oddities as dramatic and modern as they are retro. Check out single Runaway from his latest LP Natural Changes. (This blurb was featured on the latest SXSW issue of The Deli Magazine, dedicated to psychedelia)

Comprised of David Perlick-Molinari (French Horn Rebellion), Deidre Muro (Savoir Adore, Deidre & The Dark), and Derek Muro (Love Like Deloreans), Violet Sands plays a brand of atmospheric, melodic synth pop that absorbs and reorganizes in often bizarre ways influences ranging from R’n’B to hip hop. The band’s debut EP Strange Attractor is set for release on May 6th via Ensemble Records, check out below their latest single Coming Back,  and – if you dig – also the more uptempo previous single No Matter What. 

We’ve been following harpist Pamela Martinez’s project Teletextile for a while now (check out this interview from 2009), and it’s great to see good things happening for an artist that has always been pushing the envelop and trying new things. Pamela recently started performing in British songwriter Chad Valley’s band, and joined him on a tour spanning from the Philipines to Austin for SXSW, and to Europe later in the spring. Just before the tour, Teletextile released an EP entitled The Lark, accompanied by a series of videos, the first one of which we are premiering below. Expect more music and videos from this project later in 2016.

Blending the classic post-hardcore guttural screams with an epic, often tense, but always intelligible wall of distorted guitars reminiscent of shoegazer, Brooklyn emerging band DRIFTOFF (born from a rib of Boston’s Junius) comes across as brutal and ethereal at once. The band has just returned from a five week long tour that took them from New Haven’s Bar on February 10 to the Tiefgrund in Berlin on March 17, with in-between dates in NYC (Bowery Ballroom), Island, the Netherlands and Italy. Now, that sounds like a pretty awesome vacation! No local shows in sight for them at the moment.